The baking equivalent of a coloring book. # 366: Designed Sponge Cake

This was way too much fun to decorate and was truly the best way to use up my frosting freezer stash.

This sponge recipe always turns out such smooth sides that it’s hard not to leave it as a naked cake! At this point I’m not sure where I got it from, but it’s a safe bet to assume it was from Sophie Bamford of All Day Cake in one of her super thorough recipe comparisons. 10/10.

The design is just portions of the batter that are dyed fun colors and piped on to parchment paper, then covered with the rest of the batter. Once baked, you flip it out and the design is magically baked into the top! Wasting cake batter is basically sacrilege so I piped the rest of the colorful batter on top of the cake before baking, hence the rebellious color streaks in the bottom layer. Just a sponge trying to express herself.

Sadly this second cake cracked when I removed it from it’s tin before it was fully cool. Impatience strikes again! Luckily it made delicious cake pops, crumbled up with some leftover buttercream and dunked in chocolate.

No half recipes this time! This was a full five egg situation.

This recipe calls for beating the butter into the dry ingredients first, just like rubbing the fat into the flour for pie dough or shortbread. It feels odd after years and years of always creaming the butter with sugar first, but it works so beautifully I’m not going to argue.

So smooth and fluff.

Went with orange, purple, green, black and yellow in a last spooky huzzah before Halloween.

Ok ready for a mind twister? You need to write your design forwards on the parchment paper, then flip it upside down in the pan and pipe the colorful batter on backwards. I know, I’m sorry. That way, you don’t get sharpie or graphite baked into your cake and still get the design that’s facing the right way when flipped out!

Lesson learned: simply snipping off the tip of the bag gets a finer piped line than the smallest piping tip in my collection.

Felt cute, might bake later.

Just a girl and her audiobook, piping tiny squares of batter onto parchment paper for no reason. Bliss.

The bonus colorful batter giving a sneak peak of what lies beneath.

Ta-da!

My frozen cream mousseline broke a little bit while defrosting, but still tasted magnificent. The description of creme mousseline (“pastry cream that’s been lightened with butter”) should be applauded in all its oxymoronic glory.

Not quiiite enough in my freezer stash to make a smooth cream edge, so just focus on the golden brown cake amazingness instead.

It feels like an optical illusion and I love it.

Happy munching!

Inspired by The Squeaky Mixer’s floral designed cake for Mother’s Day